by Jay Kristoff
“Please.” She licked her lips, voice cracking. “Where am I?”
“Eh?” The scarred man frowned, turned toward her.
“Can you understand me?”
“Little.” He pinched the air between forefinger and thumb. “Little.”
“Where am I?” She annunciated the words clearly. “Where?”
He snapped at her—an angry spiel she didn’t understand.
“I don’t—”
Roaring, face growing red, storming over to the cot. He raised his hand and she shied away, cringing against the wall. The slap caught her full on the cheek, knocked her near-senseless, kindling the pain lurking behind her eyes. Sinking down onto the mattress, she screwed one eye shut in anticipation of another blow.
“Piotr.” The blond boy spoke a mouthful of tumbling words, concern plain in his voice.
Yukiko looked up at the dark-haired gaijin, blood in her mouth, salt biting at the split in her lip. She thrashed briefly against her restraints.
“You touch me again and I’ll kill you…” she spat.
The man lowered his hand, calloused, broad as a war fan. He stared at his fingers and mumbled, limped back to the blond, spitting out another tangle of nonsense. The boy stalked from the room, wet footprints in his wake. The older man lurked by the doorway, running one finger down the scar beneath his eye, thunderclouds gathered over his head.
With shaking hands, he fished a wooden pipe carved like a fish from his pocket, stuffing it with dry leaves from a leather pouch. Yukiko could see a red jacket with brass buttons beneath his white coat, more insignia pinned to the collar.
Crossed swords.
A soldier?
“Sorry.” He waved to her face. “He sorry, you.”
Yukiko stared at the man’s leg, saying nothing. She could see a metal brace buckled around his shin, a piston-driven actuator at his knee. Flesh, augmented with machinery.
Like the Guild …
The man snapped his fingers on another slab of burnished steel lifted from a breast pocket. Fire gleamed in his blind eye, deepened the shadow of the hooked scar along his left cheek as he coaxed his pipe to life. He snapped his fingers again and the flame was snuffed out.
“Who are you people?” she asked.
The man shrugged, muttered words Yukiko didn’t understand. She hung her head, breathing deep, suddenly and terribly afraid. The scent drifting from the gaijin’s lips reminded her of her father. Of cloying smoke curling up through a graying moustache. Of stained fingers and a bloated body wrapped all in white, waiting for the fire to claim it. And she hadn’t even been there. Hadn’t even said good-bye …
Don’t cry.
Don’t you dare.
“Gods?”
She looked up at the gaijin’s face. He was pointing to the sky, the brow above his blind eye raised in question.
“Have gods?”
“Hai,” she nodded. “I have gods.”
The man put his pipe to his lips, shook his head, spoke through clenched teeth as he shuffled from the room.
“Pray.”
* * *
Yukiko sat in the dark for long moments, waiting for the headache to subside. She could hear crashing surf, smell rust and oil hanging in the air. Shivering in her damp clothes, she clenched her fists repeatedly, thongs cutting into her wrists. And finally, when the ache had dimmed to a pale flicker, she pulled her slender defenses back together, brick by brick. A bulwark of all the substance she could muster; the rage Daichi had assured her was her greatest strength, mortar made of memories. Yoritomo’s blade cleaving through Buruu’s feathers. Her father’s grave. His blood on her hands. Teeth gritted. Seething. And with her wall in place, she reached out with the Kenning again.
A quick, directionless stab, feeling for any sign of Buruu, like a shout in a darkened room. But there was nothing close to his warmth nearby, and the distant, muddy heat she sensed didn’t wear his shape at all. Almost as soon as she opened herself up, the headache flared, the heat of the human bodies around her crackling, flame-bright and brittle. Beneath her feet, she felt those things waiting for her, cold and ancient and reptilian. And so she shut it off, locked inside her skull and leaving herself utterly alone.
Her face felt tender where the scarred man had slapped her, tongue probing her split lip. She tasted salt. Blood.
Closing her eyes, she remembered the smaller warmth she’d felt close by. Reaching out with a tiny, narrowed sliver of herself, she found it not far away. Curled up beside a heating duct, just a few doors down. An old blanket beneath him, tail wagging as he worried a strip of rawhide clamped between his front paws.
A dog.
Hello?
Head tilted to one side, tail falling still, one ear standing to attention.
who that!?
I’m Yukiko.
who?
Yukiko.
She could feel the shape of the hound’s mind, at once strange and familiar, like an old coat belonging to a stranger, yet fitting like it had been tailored for her. He was warm and soft, all curiosity and energy, tail beginning to wag again as she felt around his mind.
food!?
I don’t have any food. I’m sorry. What’s your name?
red!
Hello, Red.
where you? can’t see!?
I’m in a locked room down the hall.
play!?
Maybe later.
Can you tell me what this place is, Red?
… is?
What do the men do here?
catching the sky!
Catching the sky?
so silly!
She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he meant, how she could frame the question in terms he’d understand. It had been years since she’d spent time swimming in the thoughts of a real dog; the last she’d Kenned was Aisha’s puppy, but she’d known him only briefly. Hounds could be intelligent, but they didn’t understand human concepts, focused instead on the immediate, the primary. As if on cue, she could feel the cold, wet nose of his thoughts snooping around the sliver she’d lodged inside his head.
food!?
She seized upon an idea, decided to see where it led.
I think there was food outside.
The dog snapped to his feet, tail a blur.
really!?
I think so.
let’s find we share!
I’m going to use your eyes, if you don’t mind.
The dog was already scampering away, and Yukiko only caught a glimpse of his room as she slipped behind his pupils. Gray walls. Metal cot and desk. A strange, crooked machine studded with glass vacuum tubes and buttons beside a stack of too-white paper. A banner on the wall; a black field set with a circle of twelve red stars.
Red nosed a rubber flap open and belted out into a long corridor of gray concrete, wind howling through the ducts overhead. They could smell the sea; the bite of salt, a hint of rust. But there was no rot entwined with it, no refuse like the waters of Kigen Bay. It was fresh and wonderful; a bright, caustic smell clinging to all around them.
They scampered past rows of closed doors, two large gaijin with hedge-thick beards and grubby yellow rainskins chatting beside stairs leading up and down. They could hear engines, a klaxon wailing in the building’s bowels, a sharp burst of laughter. Storm rumbling overhead, the structure murmuring in sympathy.
Out of the stairwell, into what looked to be a storage bay, crates stacked to the ceiling, static electricity standing their fur on end. Strange writing, wet bootprints, finally nosing their way through a rubber flap in towering doors. And at last, out into the wind and dark of night.
A gantry of wet, iron-gray stretched out before them, ending at a sturdy railing and a sudden drop into darkness. Forty feet below, black ocean swelled, towering waves crashing into the iron legs holding them aloft, hissing in fury as they were dashed to pieces, again and again. A soup-thick mist hung in the air, lightning whipping the gloom, illuminating long stre
tches of twin iron cables spilling out from overhead and off into the darkness. Thunder cracked so close they shrunk down against the floor, tail between their legs.
can’t smell food you sure!?
Up. Look up.
They turned their eyes to the sky, to the building towering at their back. Square windows watched the sea, lit from within like empty, hollow eyes. Three stories tall, flat walls of gray brick, crawling with piping and cable. Odd, conical structures rose from its roof like the points of a lopsided crown, still more dotting the fangs of rock in the ocean around them; metal rods, twelve feet high, topped with broad, flattened spheres. Each rod had a thinner pipe wound around it, circumference growing wider as it spiraled from tip to base. Orange metal, crusted with bright green oxide, scuffed by the kiss of a thousand scrubbing brushes.
Copper.
A blue-white glow spilled from the roof, shimmering like sunlight through rippling water. Thunder rolled, and they crouched low again as lightning arced down from the sky a hundred feet away, kissing one of the copper spires out on the ocean. Electricity spiraled down the cone in a burst of blinding sparks, crackling across the twin cables back toward the building’s roof. The light in the windows pulsed briefly, the glow overhead flickering.
What are they doing?
catching the sky!
The lightning? What do they do with it?
keep in jars!
She peered through the hound’s eyes, into the raging storm. Out across the black swell, another burst of lightning struck a copper pylon, cascading along the cables in a tumble of raw electricity, up onto the impossible crown on the building’s roof. Darkness and rain and howling wind, thunder shaking their bones and shivering their skin. The dog’s terror folded into her, all tuck-tailed and whining, and she finally bid him back inside, away from the elemental fury and bottomless ocean, back into the echoing empty of the building’s innards.
The hound shook himself, jowls flapping, spraying rainwater in all directions. The walls around him rocked, mirroring Yukiko’s tremors as she closed off the Kenning, pulled back into her own tiny body, her own little self. A frail and shivering girl, cold and wet and alone, a thousand miles of storm and ocean and darkness between her and anything that might resemble home.
And of the brother who had brought her here, the mountain she’d set her back against, the one she’d come to depend on above all else, there was no sign at all.
Gods, Buruu, where are you?
20
A SIGH OR TWO
A match flared in the darkness; a burst of orange and sulfur in the palm of Michi’s hand. She cupped the light, gentle as a new-made mother, touching it to the candlewick. The wax was glossy, the color of fresh blood, perfumed with rose hip and honey. A luxury that a girl from a village like Daiyakawa would never have dreamed of.
The wick caught, and she snuffed the match with a single breath, watching the light creep along the walls. Padding across the floorboards, she placed the candle on the windowsill, pressing it against clouded glass; a lighthouse calling her comrade to treason. She stared into the palace courtyard, garden silhouettes shrouded in night, stone ancestor statuary and weeping trees, bent double under the weight of a poisoned sky. Father Moon was a faint pink stain across the haze, a featureless portrait on ashen canvas, face buried in his hands.
Leaving the light burning in the window, she crept back to the bed. She knelt and studied Ichizo’s face, the features she knew now almost as well as her own. He wasn’t a picture of perfection when he slept, some kami taken human form to lie beside her and steal her breath away. Cheek mashed into the pillow, hair tangled, drool upon his chin. Ichizo was all too real. And that was the problem.
Too good to be true.
She ran one finger across his cheek, smoothed strands of silken black from his eyes. He smiled then, like a little boy on his naming day, murmuring in his sleep.
“I know what you are,” she whispered.
Seducing her jailer had been the most logical route out of her cell, so seducing her jailer was exactly what she’d done. He was mere flesh after all, and she a woman who knew the simple craft of turning a man’s head. And if the sour taste of giving over her body bothered her at first, it was soon sweetened by the fact that Hiro’s new Lord Magistrate was not an unattractive man, nor entirely unpleasant company if all truths were told. Learned, but not arrogant. A philosopher, a lover of poetry, a noble not inclined to cruelty toward his servants. There were worse men to find keeping the keys to her cell in the palace of the Tora Daimyo.
She was a murderer. A killer who had ended a dozen men and lost not a wink of sleep over it. She’d committed the highest treason, abetted a terrorist, sought to bring down the government of the Imperium itself. What was the thought of giving over her body next to that? If she could take a man’s life, destroy everything he was and would ever be with a wave of her hand, she could certainly spread her legs and fake a sigh or two. For the opportunity to escape her cage, to find Aisha and free her from whatever contrivance kept her chained within these walls? She could fake more than a sigh.
The problem being, of course, that Ichizo was almost certainly playing the same game she was.
The first time she’d felt his lips pressed to hers, she’d known. His kiss was too tender, too hesitant. She’d had to coax his hands onto her skin, throw herself upon him. He played the smitten fool, whispering sweet words, showering her with secret gifts. And it might have been plausible—she might have almost believed it, until last night when he’d cupped her cheek in his palm, kissed her on each eyelid and whispered that he thought perhaps he loved her.
Love.
No magistrate, no servant of the Tora could be that obtuse.
This bastard was playing her, as surely as she was playing him. Any night now, she expected him to turn talk to Aisha. To Yukiko. To the Kagé. Only a matter of time. She had to be out of here before he realized she knew exactly what he was.
The nightingale floor began singing; the high-pitched chirp of nails within metal clamps, the creak of dry pine. She heard footsteps, too light to be a bushiman, too cautious to be a servant simply doing her rounds.
No One.
Michi watched Ichizo’s face, listened for any catch in his breathing as the footsteps stopped outside her door. But his features were as serene as a sleeping babe’s, the rise and fall of his chest smooth as clockwork in a Lotusman’s skin. She stood, fluid motion and whispering silk, making less sound than the candlelight shadows flickering on the walls. And in four silent steps, she knelt beside the threshold and waited.
Moments later, a scrap of rice-paper slipped through the crack between door and floorboards. Three inches square, covered in artless kanji.
“Safe to talk?”
Flipping the paper over, she marked her reply with a kohl stick.
“Not alone. Must be swift.”
She slipped the paper back under the door, waiting for the reply.
“Who with?”
“Lord Magistrate Ichizo.”
A deathly still pause. A catch in the girl’s breath beyond the door. Michi heard her rise, thought for a moment she might be leaving. When she opened the next note, it was hastily scrawled with a trembling hand.
“Are you mad?”
“Some would say.”
“Overheard rumor he spoke to Daimyo on your behalf. Wondered why. Makes sense now.”
“Ichizo spoke to Hiro?”
“Asked him to release you. Bushimen said he was mooning over you like lovesick boy.”
Michi glanced back to the bed, eyes narrowed.
“He is a serpent. Nothing more. Hiro’s response?”
“Refused. Cares only for power consolidation and Stormdancer’s death.”
“What of Aisha?”
“Saw her yesterday evening on balcony.”
“How was she?”
“Could not ask. Guildsmen with her.”
“How did she look?”
“Bruised. Sick.
Sad.”
“Wedding?”
“Proceeding. Dragon and Phoenix clanlords both en route.”
“What news from the Iishi?”
“Kuro Street safe house hit in dawn raid. No way to talk to Iishi.”
Cold panic set her jaw to clenching, breath catching in her lungs. She glanced over her shoulder at Ichizo’s sleeping form, licked at suddenly dry lips.
“Raid? How? Anyone taken?”
“Akihito safe. Staying with me. Others maybe scattered. Maybe imprisoned. Checking drop box again today with Akihito when shift finishes. No word yet.”
“If we cannot speak to Iishi, must save Aisha ourselves.”
“The three of us?”
“Wedding must be stopped.”
“Cannot even escape room?”
Michi sat for a handful of heartbeats, listening to Ichizo breathing, the wind whispering in the stunted gardens outside. Eyes roaming the bedchamber that was her prison. Mind racing.
“Wait.”
She stood, moving like smoke. Formless. Soundless. Stooping beside Ichizo’s clothes tumbled at the foot of the futon, she fished amongst silk and cotton, fingertips finally brushing a cold circlet of iron. And holding it tight in her fist, the clink and tink muted beneath the fabric, she drew the magistrate’s keys out into the flickering light.
With a soft breath, she blew out the candle in her window, its center melted into a deep scarlet pool about the smoking wick. She poured the wax into a saucer from her tea service, waiting a few moments for it to cool. And holding up Ichizo’s keys, she chose the one she’d seen him use on her bedroom door more times than she cared to remember, and pressed it into soft, blood-red warmth.
She watched him, counting his breaths, refusing to remember the feel of him inside her. The way he breathed into her hair afterward, speaking his lies. Talk of courting and love, promises she would attend Hiro’s wedding on his arm, that all whispers of her treachery would soon be put to rest. She’d played the fool of course, pretended she believed him, thanking him in the most obvious way a dishonored lady in waiting could. But the truth was she was a warrior, this bed just another battleground, her body just another weapon.
The lotus must burn.